Open source license usage on GitHub.com:
Open source simply isn’t open source without a proper license. Unless you’ve explicitly told others that they can modify and reuse your work, you’ve only showed others your code; you haven’t shared it. Here at GitHub, we’re big fans of open source, so we set out to better understand how our users approached licensing their code by looking at license usage across public, non-forked repositories, in hopes of encouraging more users to share their work with others.
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Share your code
If you haven’t already, we encourage you to add a
LICENSE
file to your project. To make things a bit easier, if you begin to create a file namedLICENSE
via the web interface, we’ll even provide you with a list of common license templates to choose from.This is just the start. Look forward to a more in depth analysis over the coming weeks as to how license usage affects project success, as we delve deeper into the numbers. Of course, in the mean time, we encourage you to explore license usage on GitHub using the Licenses API.
Happy open source licensing!
[One of the many parts of software development that I truly enjoy is making easy things easier. It’s not hard to include a license in a project, but time is always at a premium and discipline is as well. When something requires even a little bit of both the chances that a large community will consistently perform those actions diminishes. Of course, even better, is when someone does it for you. Sadly, the vast majority of the code I’ve written will never see the light of day. But that’s the way it goes. We (at work) open source what we can, when we can.]